On the 47 bus there was an old crazy lady who had a face like that of a corpse, and would dress it up with incredible amounts of pink and red lipstick and rouge. She will actually be a corpse by now. Internally, the transition will have seemed like quite a major one, but to the rest of the world there probably wasn’t much difference.

Likewise, the people who used to see me on the bus every day never once gave a thought to the fact that I stopped riding it abruptly sometime in 2001. In fact, I suspect they never even realized that anything was different. And I don’t look like a corpse at all.

Well, not entirely.

—

Sesame street teaches children that a) karate is for men and b) it is used to do the work that is otherwise done by wood-cutting and cinderblock-cutting saws.

Also, the X Files are still shown in syndication almost continuously.

And everyone loves images of hell, the more depraved the better. Whenever an image of hell is about to be displayed, everyone secretly leaps and dances with anticipation inside, then is secretly disappointed when it really isn’t that disturbing after all.